@inproceedings{wang-2026-tabletcraft,
    title = "{T}ablet{C}raft: Bridging a 4,000-Year Cultural Gap with Bidirectional {A}kkadian {NMT} and Cuneiform Rendering",
    author = "Wang, Zhaohui Geoffrey",
    editor = "Prabhakaran, Vinodkumar  and
      Dev, Sunipa  and
      Benotti, Luciana  and
      Hershcovich, Daniel  and
      Cao, Yong  and
      Zhou, Li  and
      Ma, BOlei  and
      Adebara, Ife",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in {NLP} ({C}3{NLP} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.c3nlp-1.10/",
    pages = "132--136",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-420-0",
    abstract = "Half a million cuneiform clay tablets survive in museums worldwide, yet modern humans can neither read nor write in the world{'}s oldest writing system, creating a 4,000-year cultural barrier that existing NLP tools have only partially addressed. Prior work enables one-way, scholar-oriented translation from Akkadian to English, but offers no path in the reverse direction: ordinary people cannot express their own thoughts in cuneiform, and thus remain passive consumers of ancient culture rather than active participants. We present TabletCraft, the first open-source system that enables bidirectional interaction with Mesopotamian writing. Users can read ancient tablets (Akkadian to English) and write their own messages as cuneiform clay tablets (English to Akkadian to cuneiform to rendered tablet). The system integrates a ByT5-based translation model trained on 116K bidirectional samples, a cuneiform sign converter with 14,240 mappings (95.3{\%} coverage), and a visual tablet renderer, packaged as a pip-installable toolkit with both a command-line interface and a web demo."
}